Preview as PDF Viewer for LaTeX Workshop on Visual Studio Code on macOS

how-to, ,

After switching to Visual Studio Code as LaTeX editor, I installed the LaTeX Workshop extension to gain decent support for editing LaTeX files on Code.

After fiddling around with the settings, I still was not able to use Preview on macOS.

First of all, make sure external PDF viewers are enabled in the user settings.

"latex-workshop.view.pdf.viewer": "external"

Furthermore, set Preview es external viewer. The trick here is, don’t think about Preview as a viewer, actually, it is the open command.

Just set up the viewer as you would start preview on a terminal.

open -a preview mybook.pdf
This command used for user settings eventually ends in the following section.
"latex-workshop.view.pdf.external.command": {
    "command": "open",
    "args": [
        "-a",
        "preview",
        "%PDF%"
    ]
}
With these settings, Preview will spawn with the created PDF right out of Visual Studio Code.